...say “I just wish you could be more (feeling) about (event or thing).”?

Because my mom and I just had a fight because I didn’t react the way she wanted me to about a certain thing that she’s been orchestrating, and so then she throws in the martyr card. “Fine, you know what, I’ll just take a day off of work and drive the three hours and do it myself.”

Because she says I rolled my eyes when she told me about an added layer of complexity to a plan that I’ve been asking for clarification on for over a week.

I may have rolled my eyes. That’s totally valid. But whenever we fight, which is rarely, it’s usually around this idea of me not responding the right way to something. And I’ve noticed that this has been a pattern from my childhood, of me not responding right. I used to (when I was a child) try and always make sure I responded correctly—-I was always nice, and polite and did my best to never inconvenience anyone, even when the “inconvenience” was not actually an inconvenience at all. Even when it went against my own interests. And I was always supposed to be happy about it.

So we had a fight and she started doing the whole “You always...” and “You never...” and I finally reached my breaking point and said no. We’re not doing this anymore. We’ve been having the same kind of fights like this for years and I’m not doing it anymore. No more of this “always” and “never.” When she puts it in those terms, I feel like it negates the numerous times I showed proper enthusiasm for big things (and no, the enthusiasm wasn’t faked. I was genuinely happy for her to have her students’ recital and was more than happy to help, for example.) But when she says “You just never show excitement about things like (what she orchestrated for two weeks from now,” it makes me feel like a disappointment.

And I get mad because there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m reacting the way I do to things like (example). It’s just not the way she reacts. So there’s something deficient with me. And I’m so done with that. And I’m done having the same kind of arguments as we’ve always had. So I told her we could work this out, but no more of the same. We need to find a better way to resolve these things that shouldn’t even be fights in the first place. For both my mental health and hers! I can’t be constantly trying to moderate my reactions to please others (which I do...I’ve been working on not doing that as much, because it’s bad for me), and she can’t constantly be tying her happiness with a situation to the way someone else reacts to it. Because she’ll always be in conflict because people will never be giving her the reactions she wants.